So happy to have just found this community been searching though the posts all day and saving a bunch I am going to dive into.
Anyways, what is everyone’s backup strategy look like? I’ve always been overly caution when it comes to backups and try and have several discs on hand.
For my Mac Pro 5,1
I have 2 Time Machine Backups Running
1 x 2TB Time Capsule
1 X Internal 4TB HDD
I’ve never fully restored from a TM backup because it takes so long but its nice to be able to restore a single file or more commonly an app that updated and broke.
With Carbon Copy Cloner
Nightly Clone with Safety Net to a SSD.
Weekly bootable to 3 External NVME on rotating basis Details below
A Few monthly clones on assortment of HDDs
Cloning of Specific Folders (Pictures, Documents, Movies) to NAS Drive
Monthly Clone of drive kept offsite after task
Rotating NVME Tasks: I have 3 external NVME’s that I run a weekly bootable clone on a rotating weekly basis.
Week 1 = Clone A
Week 2 = Clone B
Week 3 = Clone C
These are nice because if my NVME dies I can just insert the most recent one and be mostly up and running as well as if something was corrupted a few days prior I can use an older week NVME.
As I type this out it feels a bit overboard but it was all set up over about 2 years and once I got it up and running its pretty smooth.
My daily driver is an iPad Pro and I use a MBA as a home server. Routine files are kept on Google Drive and sync to my MBA. Sensitive files are copied to iCloud then automatically moved to a non-iCloud folder on the MBA (via Hazel). Arqbackup runs hourly backups to Backblaze B2 and Chronosync does nightly copies to an external drive.
My photos automatically sync to iCloud and Google Photos. I have two scheduled google takeout jobs that result in a monthly export of all the data (mail, calendar, contacts, etc., except photos) in my Google Workspace account. These are downloaded to my MBA and are included in my normal backups. I don’t take a lot of pictures so I do the occasional manual download of my Google Photos as needed.
I use Arq to a NAS (every 3hrs), and external drive (every hour).
Backblaze for cloud backup (continuous).
CCC backs up my boot drive to an SSD (daily).
And Arq to an external once a month that I rotate out.
Roughly once a year I retire my external backup drive and keep it as a long-term backup.
I need to find a backup solution for my Linux system that is my daily driver lately.
Sounds like you have good short-term coverage.
If I understand your setup correctly, in the event of a catastrophe (fire, flood, theft, ransomware, etc.) you could potentially lose about 2 months work, assuming the incident happened the day before you were to take your monthly backup to work.
For your monthly off-site, I assume you have a couple of drives you rotate out? If you have a single drive that you, for instance, bring home, do a backup, then take back to work, then your margin of safety is greatly reduced.
Personally, I would replace/augment the monthly offsite with Backblaze. I added the one-year data retention to my subscription. BB backs up my iMac Pro and my girlfriend’s laptop. Importantly, neither of us have to do anything, it just chugs along in the background.
Each iMac has a SSD attached that gets hourly CCC updates. We have a Mac mini with 24tb storage in JBOD enclosures. One drive is a TM destination. The other is a CCC destination for the 2 iMacs. It also has a drive holding media files and archives. That drive gets backed to another drive. All the drives get backed up to BackBlaze.
Most important thing is to test the backups regularly. I download files from BackBlaze and verify the TN and CCC copies. The one test I haven’t done is getting a backup disk from BackBlaze. My philosophy is that an untested backup is not a backup.
Time Machine to a Synology NAS, which is then backed up to Synology C2. The fixed bucket cost made it a more attractive option than Backblaze B2 with HyperBackup’s frequent downloading.
I also run Backblaze Backup, makes me feel better to have a backup solution independent of Time Machine + backups while I’m away from home.
Remember to turn off optimization for iCloud Photos so that they stay on your device and get backed up.
(Reviving this old thread as the topic seemed evergreen, but please advise if that’s not the preferred forum etiquette.)
I just stepped through a bit of a revamp of my backup setup, cycling in a new 8TB external as my previous 5TB external was 5+ yrs old. To help my brain, I mapped it out, and here’s where I landed with a mix of iCloud, Time Machine, and Backblaze. Critiques welcome.
For those of you who use Backblaze, do you prefer Computer Backup or B2? (And if B2, do you use Arq to interface with B2?)
My goal is to have a complete, offsite backup of my Mac’s hard drive, not just my documents, so that if I lose my system I can replace everything on my drive from the offsite backup. And, if I get a desktop Mac in addition to my MBP, to backup both. Each one will have about 800GB of data. TY for your ideas!
Backblaze’s Desktop service, while allowing unlimited disk space, does not backup everything to give you a way to restore a total system from that backup. Read their documentation on their website for more details on Desktop vs. the more expensive B2 service.
As I recall, I started using Arq to backup to AWS in 2012, and switched to B2 a few months after that became an option in v5.9 around 2017.
I don’t backup applications or music and movies ripped from original sources that I own. I do test restores several times a year to insure my backed up files are not corrupted and can be restored.
